Posted
by
timothyon Tuesday March 31, 2009 @08:47AM
from the kick-the-tires-check-the-fluids dept.

N!NJA writes with this snippet of a report from Reuters: "NASA gave visitors to the National Mall in Washington a peek at a full-size mock-up of the spacecraft designed to carry US astronauts back to the moon and then on to Mars one day. The design of Orion was based on the Apollo spacecraft, which first took Americans to the moon. Although similar in shape, Orion is larger, able to carry six crew members rather than three, and builds on 1960s technology to make it safer."
They're still working on the parachute.

Current Unixes (Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Darwin, Solaris, etc.) are also a derivative of 1960s technology. And if we were talking about that, the Unix and most of tne Linux guys, at least, would all be saying "yeah, but it's stable because it's so mature."

what's the difference then, with a 1960s Apollo-derived capsule, then?

No, apparently coming up with a new name was too complicated for Nasa. I don't have much faith in the ability of an air and space agency which can't name two constellations to produce a working Earth-Mars vehicle...

Nah, I prefer to win the game by global conquest. It's much more entertaining to pour all of your resources into armies, fleets and aircraft than spaceship components. Those fucking Celts will soon pay for sacking Athens back in 3400 BC, muhahahahahahahahaha.

Would that be the large, unmarked banks of blinking square lights, the female voice that always says "Insufficient Data" followed by a dramatic orchestral chord, or the engine that the chief engineer can only repair 10 seconds before destruction?

There is really not enough data to attest Apollo spacecraft were much safer than the shuttles. There were less than two dozen Apollo manned launches with one nearly (because the crew got really, really lucky) catastrophic accident and more than a hundred shuttle launches done by a small fleet that went to space a couple times each with two very serious mishaps.

The best one can do is to extrapolate on data from about a hundred Soyuz missions. Soyuz seems to be slightly safer than shuttle and has in common with the Orion both the 60's tech and the mostly expendable architecture (IIRC, some systems are transferred from a used Soyuz to a new one after being recertified).

I agree that overall safety can only be assessed based on a large enough statistical sample, and we don't have that. But there are several known failure modes of the Shuttle that Apollo and Orion either don't have, or have backup safety systems that the Shuttle doesn't have:

A launchpad (and post launch) escape system that can pull the re-entry vehicle clear of an exploding launch vehicle.

The potential to abort a mission after launch before reaching orbit.

Re-entry heat shield is protected from impacts from ice/foam during launch.

All of these seem to argue in favor of Orion being safer than Shuttle.
There are two obvious downsides:

Parachutes have potential failure modes shuttle does not have.

Re-use has the potential to reduce risks (most of the parts have already been test-flown). There's no way to test-fly a non-reusable vehicle.

On balance, I tent to like the KISS approach, so favor the capsule. But you're correct; actual safety comes down to how well all the systems are actually designed and implemented. A simpler approach, poorly implemented, is no safer than a complicated approach implemented well.

There is an apocryphal story about how the SRB's on the Space Shuttle are directly related to the width of a horse's ass... Snopes [snopes.com] has called the story "false" when in fact it is the case that the SRB's are limited in their size by the width of a horse's ass...
The simple fact is that all technology is based on the technology that came before it. The computer industry is rife with examples... most of us are still using x86 technology is one... Why should rocketry be different?

Indeed, good example. Although lot of the 1960's stuff wasn't exactly rocket science....for example, the Saturn V's had a problem with instabilities building up on the face of the combustion plate due to the pattern of holes that the fuel/oxidiser was sprayed through. In the end they got a bunch of blank combustion plates and drilled holes at random until they found one that worked without blowing the rocket to smithereens....or at least worked for the eight minutes or so that it took to get to orbit.

Indeed, good example. Although lot of the 1960's stuff wasn't exactly rocket science....for example, the Saturn V's had a problem with instabilities building up on the face of the combustion plate due to the pattern of holes that the fuel/oxidiser was sprayed through. In the end they got a bunch of blank combustion plates and drilled holes at random until they found one that worked without blowing the rocket to smithereens....or at least worked for the eight minutes or so that it took to get to orbit.

People forget that the Apollo project killed off the much more reasonable X-plane [wikipedia.org] development, one of which by 1962 was already flying at an altitude of sixty miles. Progression to space travel was seen as the logical next step. But when JFK decided "HOLY FUCK WE GOTTA GO TO THE MOON!", and the developers told him it might be possible to do deep space stuff by the seventies, he opted to kill the project and go for Wernher von Braun's batshit insane rockets instead.

People forget that the Apollo project killed off the much more reasonable X-plane development, one of which by 1962 was already flying at an altitude of sixty miles. Progression to space travel was seen as the logical next step. But when JFK decided "HOLY FUCK WE GOTTA GO TO THE MOON!", and the developers told him it might be possible to do deep space stuff by the seventies, he opted to kill the project and go for Wernher von Braun's batshit insane rockets instead.

Um, reasonable in what way? It certainly wasn't useful for putting cargo in orbit. The most efficient and practical way (currently) to put anything into space is an engine strapped to gigantic gas tank strapped to a little bit of cargo. Adding additional stuff like wings, landing gears, rudder (and a frame to support it all) only detracts from the amount of cargo you can launch and seems to have negligible reuse benefits as demonstrated by the space shuttle.

Um, reasonable in what way? It certainly wasn't useful for putting cargo in orbit. The most efficient and practical way (currently) to put anything into space is an engine strapped to gigantic gas tank strapped to a little bit of cargo. Adding additional stuff like wings, landing gears, rudder (and a frame to support it all) only detracts from the amount of cargo you can launch and seems to have negligible reuse benefits as demonstrated by the space shuttle.

For the X-15 series, you might just be right. But the proposed X-20 was the plane that eventually got the chop. This one had a rocket too, which essentially made it a prototype space shuttle. Reusable. What's more, the Titan rockets they wanted for it had 2.5 million pounds of thrust (11,100,000 force newtons) compared with the Mercury-Atlas' 367,000 (1,600,000). What made them cut the project was that the Atlas rockets were already available whereas the more powerful Titan rockets were still four years away.

I know you'll probably mod me a troll but I have a sinking felling that me and actually many of the people reading slashdot will never see a real push into space by humanity. I really want to remain optimistic about it but for me this whole orion project is like a reminder of where we *could* have been at the completion of the Apollo launchers.

Don't get me wrong I hope we get off this rock and have a *real* space program but I suspect that I am not the only person reading this that thinks they were born before their time.

I know you'll probably mod me a troll but I have a sinking felling that me and actually many of the people reading slashdot will never see a real push into space by humanity

We'll see a real push into space by humanity when there is an actual economic incentive for doing so. When Earth becomes completely overpopulated and/or runs into resource shortages, that's when we'll see space flight really take off. As much as I love NASA, as a Governmentally funded agency they are always going to be held hostage to political considerations -- and you just know some Congressman needs some pork^Weconomic development back home more than NASA needs to go to Mars.

Space flight is not going to be a solution to overpopulation for a really long time. The cost of getting something to LEO is around $20,000 per Kg, maybe as low as $4,000 / Kg if you go with something with a fairly high failure rate. The cost with a space elevator would be around $220/Kg, just for the marginal costs, assuming that the magical space pixies built the elevator for free, or closer to $2,000/Kg for the full cost.

Assume a person plus their life support equipment (no possessions) weighs around 100Kg, and you've got a cost of $200K to get someone into orbit (using wildly optimistic figures based on technology that doesn't exist yet). Getting them to somewhere where they can live, and including the cost of actually building that habitat, is likely to at least double this cost and more likely add another order of magnitude.

The people who can afford this kind of expense (probably around $2m, more for anything much above subsistence living) are going to be the ones who can already afford a very comfortable life down here. The people who will most want to leave Earth will be the ones who can't afford to.

I didn't claim it was a solution. Only that external economic factors will drive space exploration. IANARS (I am not a rocket scientist) but my hunch would be that resource shortages will drive the initial commercialization of space. Over time as the spaceflight components become standardized and mass produced it would stand to reason that the costs will come down.

You know, 3/4 (or 70.1% according to a recent test) of the earth is currently uninhabited. It would be much cheaper to build underwater / on water habitats than dump people in space. But we're not doing it because it's still too expensive. An enormous amount of the human population is living at essentially, baseline survival levels or quite near it. They have no spare cash for anything, including Starbucks.

I have this sneaky suspicion that the overpopulation of humans will 'take care of itself' before we get any significant population in outer space....

Unfortunately, starting a new civilization on another planet is prohibitively expensive.

Think about the support structure needed to really START a new civilization.

You need the basics first.
Water
Food
Electricity
Healthcare (doctors and basic equipment for emergencies)

After that you're going to need places to live and work. I mean, when you're out there, someone has to be making a profit to make it worth even going (yes, that's the world we live in). So you have to assume there is something to mine/c

We could have 1 way manned missions to mars right now. Ill bet there would be volunteers.

I'm sure there would be, but in general, the public outcry would be huge. When the inevitable question of returning gets asked by a journalist and NASA admitted that "Yeah, we're not actually planning on bringing them back." there would be uproar and demands that such a barbaric organization lose funding immediately. It's not about the handful of volunteers willing to go - it's about the masses that will refuse to fund a suicide mission.

Would it still be a suicide mission if you're sent with sufficient resources (possibly through intermittent resupplying) to live out the rest of your normal lifespan on Mars? And by the time round trips are realistic, you might even someday get to come back!

Good point, yes, obviously making a spacecraft to carry six people to Mars is as simple as just coming up with the idea "make it bigger". It's not like it's rocket science, is it. They should have just read your comment here on Slashdot, we'd be there by now.

What a waste of those tax dollars, if only we hadn't spent all that money funding NASA this past five years we could have had enough for, I don't know, almost an extra year of war in Iraq ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget [wikipedia.org] ). And it's not like t

It also screams failure to me. The ride to the moon was a sunday drive in a car, the trip to mars is quite a bit longer. Cramming 6 guys in a soupcan for that long is a BAD IDEA. why cant we build something larger? Yeah, yeah launch capacity.. who says it has to be assembled here on the planet, why cant they make the parts screw together in space? We launched skylab, and that was larger than this. use 3 launches. 1 for the engine and spacionics pack, 1 for the crew cab, and 1 for the mars lander. a

I (for once) RTFA, and from what I gathered, they've developed this module and updated launcher to provide an effective round trip mechanism for Moon expeditions, where they will practice the operations that will be required when a full scale Mars mission is executed (sometime around between 2020-2030). I think the important point is that NASA is realizing that the shuttle is not an effective mission system for the next generation of Moon missions, which are a pre-req for any future Mars missions.

To me, this actually sounds like a sober assessment - and one that is long overdue.

* Moon-Mars is basically unfunded. NASA has to steal from other missions just to study Moon-Mars
* The moon is a lousy steppingstone to Mars. Think about it: to land on a planet with an atmosphere, you can slow down with a parachute. To overcome your delta-V for a moon landing, you need to carry enough fuel to decelerate and to re-launch! If you just skip the moon entirely, you don't have that horribly expensive deceleration phase followed by that expensive acceleration phase.

Face it, most of the actual science done in space has been done by robots and will continue to be for the forseeable future. Humans in space is not a bad idea, but Bush didn't fund Moon-Mars and it's unlikely to get funded any time in the forseeable future. Personally, I've always thought Moon-Mars was a cynical political ploy to win a slice of the nerd vote. But that's just me.

Similar to the moon missions any Mars mission will have at least 1 and likely 2-3 other modules that will rendezvous in orbit and make the trip to Mars as one craft.

You'll note the heavy lift rocket portion of Constellation can carry far more weight than any US rocket to date. The whole reason for that is lifting large modules for a larger craft. (lunar lander, mars lander, mars transit habitat, whatever).

In real world engineering, form follows function. Just like the Airbus 380 [wikipedia.org] is basically an enlarged Boeing Dash 80 [wikipedia.org], the Orion is an enlarged Apollo. For both functions there's only so many forms that work, and no particular reason not to choose something proven. This isn't fad and fashion driven product design (like the latest iCoolthing), but something people's lives will depend on.

Ah, am I the only one reading this and questioning just exactly what the hell we have been paying NASA Engineers millions of dollars for over the last 45 years?

I mean, I'm all for K.I.S.S. methodology and all, but damn, 40+ years worth of advances should not be completely looked over for "tried and true". Even that is questionable, given Apollos not-so-perfect track record.

Hell, how many "safety" features are still in use today from the 60's in automobiles?

It is just marketing to make people think they are using pre-existing tech to keep things cheap.

If they came out and said they were working on a shape shifting liquid metal clokeable craft for the Mars mission it would die in five minutes because people would know it would cost a gazillion dollars.

The current path will still cost a gazillion dollars, just not scare the public in to rejecting it before it gets off the ground.

Well seat belts came in around the late 60's... I think what they mean is the fundamental craft was sound (in the same way that cars are still fairly car-shaped) however they are now adding ABS, Air bags and a musical horn.

Hell, how many "safety" features are still in use today from the 60's in automobiles?

This is purely off the top of my head, so I might have things a bit mis-placed... but I know that these were in use during the 60s:Dual-chamber master cylinderDisk brakesSeat BeltsPadded dashBreakaway steering columnUnibody constructionCrumple zonesHalogen HeadlampsProtected passenger area

There is no doubt that cars are safer and more reliable today - but you are very wrong if you think that they aren't "built upon" 1960s technology.

A joke, yes, but IIRC, the breakaway steering column is meant to keep the steering column from being pushed straight up into the driver's chest in a frontal impact. A huge column a metal hitting you at high speed just isn't good. There are some things that you WANT to break in a car in certain circumstances. Imagine it as a non-electrical equivalent of a safety fuse of sorts.

Sets some interesting challenges never mind the amount of time to get there but simple landing and taking off again will be horrendous. Bear in mind that to achieve even Low earth Orbit you kneed some pretty impressive ordinance. Getting back from the moon will be a piece of piss in comparison at only 16.6% earth gravity but Mars's gravity is 38% earth gravity which means any escape mechanism is going to kneed orders of magnitude more impulse in order to achieve marsion orbit compared to to same feat on the moon. I'm not sure it could be achieved with a single stage rocket although I admit it's a possibility. But what about Launch a pad???? Will it be Liquid or Solid propellant???? Many many questions of which I'm sure even NASA hasn't even started to look for answers yet.

You'd prefer they lie? The fact is that the safest configuration has been shown to be a capsule that can re-enter more or less ballistic in a pinch. It might bang the astronauts up a bit, but at least they'll live to talk about it. And if the rocket malfunctions at launch, they are way up at the top where shrapnel can't hit them.

A shuttle-like craft is great if you need to bring stuff back home, and this presumed to be a requirement in the 70s, but hasn't really been used much in practice. In the future, an

Because when you're selling something that looks like a used Edsel, you've gotta make up some flimsy excuse to get people to buy it.

"Sure, it's ugly and it looks like something from 40 years ago but... Safety! Yeah, that's it! Boy, they sure don't build 'em like they used to, do they? Well now they do! Yessiree, built like a tank with none of that 'computerized fuel injector' stuff to break down. God bless America."

The vehicle in question is an ascent/re-entry craft. It might be sufficient for the trip to the moon (though certainly landing and relaunching will require a second craft as it did for Apollo), but this vehicle is not up to the task of providing suitable living conditions for a trip to Mars.

For a Mars trip this is at best a way to get up to the interplanetary vessel and return to Earth from it. Given that, I can't imagine why you would bother to cart it all the way there just to cart it back.

The only realistic approach to space travel in our solar system is to build a good nuclear-driven space ship in orbit, big enough so as that people can live many years in it, with rotating sections to simulate gravity. This spaceship will never land onto planets, but it would contain pods that could land and take off.

It could take a few trillion dollars, but if all the major countries co-operate, it is feasible. All the money spent in weapons could be spent for space exploration.

Is it too much to ask for people who read a supposedly tech site actually read, and perhaps think, before pounding their keyboards with things like "how's that little thing going to get 6 astronauts to Mars?", "NASA is stoopid", and the like?

Its proposed use is to carry up to 6 astronauts to the space station, and from there, 4 to the Moon. For the Moon missions, Orion will travel along with the Altair lunar lander.

These Mars-bound vehicles will be assembled in low Earth orbit. There is no reason to believe that 4 or 6 astronauts would be confined to the small Orion capsule for the duration of a Mars voyage.

On a side note, I was 5 years old when I watched the first manned landing on the Moon. It's amazing to me that a manned Mars mission may happen when I'm in my 70's. Certainly not how I imagined things when I was young.

I remember the moon landings well, was only 8 myself, but when an article supposedly shows the spacecraft mock up that will take us to mars, you have to question, if this wasn't it then where is the mock-up? So far NASA has not published a single design for spacecraft that would get to Mars.

From reading the NASA pdf's, it appears that a Mars mission isn't planned at this point, just blue-sky. A return to the Moon seems very much in the works, whereas the descriptions about Mars were couched with words like "possible", "one day", etc.

Yeah, I'm having a little trouble believing that's going to be an adequate space-craft for going to Mars. For a several day trip to the moon, ok - but being bottled up in that thing for 2-3 years? And where are you going to store several years worth of supplies in there?

Perhaps in the large, cylindrical service module which will be launched by Ares 5 before the crew takes off? The crew capsule is just for earth takeoff and landing. They dock with the rest of the spacecraft in earth orbit before leaving for elsewhere.

If you recall, the lunar lander attached to the re-entry capsule on the way there and the way back and added a LOT of room that wasn't there originally. I'd imagine that for a trip to mars, they'd do the same thing, just have a bigger lander/whatever module.

I believe that the capsule will only be the command center/cockpit/bridge of the spacecraft that is planned to go to Mars. The rest of the craft will be assembled in orbit from various Ares V launches.

I agree - that shit is way too small. They need shuttle size at LEAST! Talk about fish in a sardine can. At least the space shuttle is more like a small aquarium - again a bit too small but doable. I would honestly pass on that trip. Space is an issue for people - and everyone needs some alone time and space to stretch out and work-out. That's a death-trap ala mazda miata style.

I can see fitting three in the smaller 60's craft, and maybe packing 5-6 in that bigger orion, for a trip to the moon. But MARS? How can you possibly cram 5-6 people in THAT for such a long trip? That's insane.

Specially since it's small capsule.Not some big rotating structure.No rotation = no "Stanley Kubrick's 2001 : Space Odyssey"-like artificial gravity. (Or like a five-years old playing with a bucket of water, whichever mental picture you prefer)

And a trip to Mars is surely going to be rather long (several months).Several months without gravity means muscle atrophy and space osteoporosis.

Which means that once they land on mars, the astronauts will hardly be in s

You don't need rotation to create artificial gravity, you need constant acceleration. This is what the rotation in space odyssey does, and they might as well keep accelerating their craft at 1.0g, and then turn the craft around halfway and keep decelerate in 1.0g to get the same effect.

One added benefit to the rotational method is that you can gradually alter the rotation so that by the time the astronauts reach Mars, they are acclimatized to its gravity. Same thing on the trip home.

"I feel sorry for the crew who has to spend all that time in that shit box."

They won't. And you can really consider that capsule is more or less the escape pod from the real spaceship. Other way to think about it is the "shipping container for the crew and return samples".

I suppose most of the time the crew will have more spacious quarters, specially when en route to Mars. The capsule will also never get to the Martian surface - they will probably have a descent vehicle either with them since Earth or safel

Maybe it might make a little more sense to explore "the moon, Mars, and beyond" with an actual goddamn spaceship?!?! You know, one that isn't going to take a goddamn year just to get to another planet that's practically right next door, considering just how big "space" is.

Yeah, you retards. It's not rocket science.

Oh, wait, it is. I'd mis-identified the retards involved here.

For the record, there are ways of getting to Mars in substantially less time. However, they're not going to happen, because peop

There is no reason not to attach an Apollo-like capsule to a interplanetary spacecraft that has a nuclear-thermal (or anything "N") engine strapped on it. Still, you are right - the eco-folks will make it nearly impossible to have a spacecraft with sufficient power to travel between planets unless we discover some fancy new physics.

This is the crew return vehicle. Nothing really spectacular about that.